How death becomes her

Teaching the poetry of Emily Dickinson gave the eminent American literary critic, Harold Bloom, fierce headaches. The strain of deciphering her poems forced him, he said, "past my limits".

Dickinson's poetry forces all of us past our limits. She is like a frontier explorer, forever pushing into psychic territory that most of us would rather not enter. Dickinson doesn't simply peer into the abyss in the hope of glimpsing what lies beyond religious certainties about God and death or platitudes about pain and love, she clambers right down into that abyss and reports back on what she finds there.

Her preoccupations are grim - death, pain, despair, the solitariness of the soul - but her poetry is never maudlin or self-pitying. While coolly dispassionate in tone, Dickinson's determination to imagine the unimaginable and the gnomic compression of her language, gives it an extraordinary, menacing intensity, like that of the loaded gun she invokes in "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun".

The psychological landscape that many of Dickinson's poems explores is often desolate and literally godforsaken. Her mental method as an explorer of this extreme terrain is made explicit in the poem "I tried to think a lonelier Thing/ Than any I had seen -/ Some Polar Expiation - An Omen in the Bone/ Of Death's tremendous nearness".

As she forces herself to contemplate the prospect of death, the speaker seeks existential comfort in the possibility of another godforsaken "creature" like herself "Of Heavenly Love - forgot". This creature brings to mind Dr Frankenstein's reviled monster pleading with Frankenstein to make him a mate before fleeing to the icy wastes of the Arctic. The speaker conjures up her "Duplicate" but then it takes on a life of its own.

In the third verse, this longed-for soulmate metamorphoses into "Horror's twin" - presumably Death - who is locked away in solitary confinement like herself. By the final verse, the speaker is no longer forcing herself to imagine a prospect that she dreads. Her growing sense of intimacy with Death - "I almost strove to clasp his Hand" - has allowed her to achieve the "luxury" of being able to pity Death and even imagine that he pities her. Of course the idea that Death might pity one of its victims seems ironic. Yet, unlike many of her poems about death, the progression of the poem has brought the speaker to a point of wry acceptance, having robbed death of its sting by recasting it as a soulmate.

But Dickinson didn't stop at imagining what it might mean to pity Death. Rather than simply personifying death in the tradition of the medieval morality play where Death is one of many characters, she went a step further and imagined her own death so that she might report back on the experience. It is a dramatic convention that Dickinson, according to the critic Graham Burns, virtually invented for herself. Poems such as "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died" and "Because I could not stop for Death" are two of the most celebrated examples of this approach. The poems acquire enormous force and authority from the fact that they are voices from the dead. Such a perspective holds out the promise of revelations and insights into what lies beyond. Yet Dickinson makes little attempt to conjure up an afterlife. The poems are more concerned with how death gives us a fresh slant on life.

In "Because I could not stop for Death", we witness the speaker being literally carried away by death, a "kindly" gentleman. From the window of his carriage, her whole life flashes before her eyes in slow motion - childhood, maturity and old age, as symbolised by the school children, fields of grain and the setting sun. There is no sense that she is resisting or horrified by her final departure. And, far from being a terrifying experience, the journey to the grave unfolds in a leisurely, dream-like fashion.

All those expressions of horror, despair and loneliness that we associate with Dickinson's poetry are absent. To have died is to be freed of such emotions and yet there is something quite chilling about this absence of feeling or recognition. It is not until the very end that the full significance of Dickinson's irony becomes apparent.

The speaker's remarks on Death's kindness and civility, her acquiescence to this fateful journey, her failure to recognise the "swelling of the Ground" as a grave and, finally, her sense that it seems like just yesterday that she surmised she was heading for Eternity (which might well be the name of the next town), all suggest a genteel, drawing room conversation in which the participants do not recognise that they are dead. Read this way, it is an allegory about polite society's denial of death and its associated horrors, rather than the experience of it.

In "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died", a much stranger, more jarring poem, the solemness of the moment of death is disturbed by the appearance of a fly. Reporting on her death with cool-eyed detachment, the speaker observes the gathered mourners with something close to disdain, as if sensing that they, like the fly, are hovering around her in anticipation of the keepsakes she has willed away. The ironic conclusion seems to be that death is not a grand moment of revelation or terror, but a commonplace moment in which darkness begins with the small blot of a buzzing fly.

Dickinson's unflinchingly hard-headed, sceptical view of death offers few consolations. The reward of her poems is her bracing candour, her intellectual rigour and her startlingly original imagination. Not a poet for the faint-hearted.